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Neighborhood Guessing Game Over: Acres Away

None of you guessed the location of this week’s mystery home. But . . . we do have a winner of that one-year individual membership in the Rice Design Alliance!

Two readers sent in links to the listing — and helped to mix things up by posting fake guesses. We’ll award the prize to Jennifer, who did so first, and volunteered some extended commentary about the property:

I’ve actually been to see this house. I haven’t been inside, but drove to find the property to see what in the world it was after seeing it on har.com

It’s sort of an island paradise. It’s bounded on the east by a creek and on the west and south by a drainage ditch. It borders another property to the north. The house in the pictures is the main house, but there is another ramshackle house on the property plus the barn.

The entire area is smack in the middle of the revamped FEMA flood maps 100-year floodplain. A neighbor came out and told us that the area had never flooded and that they are in the middle of fighting it in the courts because the change in the flood maps has decimated their property values.

I have no idea if it would be safe to live in this area. We drove the entire area to get a look at it from all sides. The street itself is kind of isolated and the neighbor said it was safe, but just across the drainage ditch on the west side is the kind of apartment complex that shows up on the news, and not in a good way.

Thanks and congratulations, Jennifer! Karen came up with the other fake guess. We’ll call her the runner-up.

And now the details:

***

Location: 200 E. Burress St., ScharaffsDetails: 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, 2,331 sq. ft. on a 229,980-sq.-ft. lotPrice: $425,000The Scoop: Remodeled and re-roofed 1956 ranch home on the eastern bank of Little White Oak Bayou, 2 blocks south of Tidwell Rd. Brick and wood exterior. Five-plus-acre back yard includes 800-sq.-ft. barn and an older 1,382-sq.-ft second home in worse repair. Long screen porch with mosaic-tile floor in back; separate covered patio. Listed for sale for almost 2 years; price cut 4 times, a total of $100K, but raised $40K last December.

Did you have fun with this one? We hope you’ll play in our next round, next Tuesday!

6 Comment

We didn’t have access to the property itself, as it is gated and we would have been trespassing, but we did drive around and view it from all sides. The additional, non-pictured house looked to be in pretty poor shape and would take a fair amount of work to fix up from what we could tell.

I just rechecked the TSARP map and it’s not even in the 100 year floodplain – it’s in the actual watershed area, it appears. If you’re not worried about that it would be a cool property, but given its location I don’t think you’d have an easy time getting flood insurance.

The flood plain information is interesting – perhaps this is being sold at land value, although it seems hard to believe that you’d get $450K in that area of town. Unless you subdivide and build another “interesting” apartment complex.

I love the commment about “it’s never flooded.” My children use that story when I yell at them for running across the street – “I’ve never been hit by a car, Mommy!”

We know the previous owners and have been to the house more than once. If only we would have seen this last week, we could have won.
It is as charming in person as it looks in the pictures. The neighborhood around it can be offputting to some, but once you enter the property you are in your own quiet and secluded world. Someone who is not put off by the surrounding neighborhood and would enjoy having a nature park as a yard would be delighted with this home.

The pictures intrigued me, so I checked HPD’s crime stats for the property. The most recent published by HPD is from October to December. I only checked a 5 block radius around the 200 E. Burress address:

Two separate Murders (one on the eastside and one on the southwest side)
Dec. 31st an Auto Theft at that physical address (told that is where a police chase ended)
6 Robbery’s reported
2 Aggravated Assaults
5 Burglaries
2 Rapes
5 Auto Thefts (plus the one above)
6 Thefts

That and all the restrictions being in a floodway would make me very wary.